You Need to Change Your Password Now if it Is in This List

A quick study of the leaked personal information of millions of internet users in 2016 revealed people’s poor password choices. After years of being warned about how to avoid security breaches, it was found that people are still opting for easy-to-remember passwords. This resulted to easily hacked social media and other online accounts.

2016 was a year of a number of data breaches. While some sites like AdultFriendFinder were hacked, personal ids of users from sites like LinkedIn, which was hacked long ago, got released on the internet. Among the confidential information leaked, was the passwords used by those users.

Shocking Password Trends Of 2016

This gave Keeper Security, a security research firm, the unique opportunity to analyze the kind of passwords chosen by users across multiple sites. And the common trend that emerged through the results was nothing less than shocking. More than 17% of people used the most basic password – “123456”.

Other commonly used passwords were just some variations of the same popular password. “123456789” was the second most used password while “12345678” came in fourth. Repetitions of a particular number also appeared in the list of worst password trends discovered. While “111111” was found to be the fifth favorite password among users, passwords like “666666” and “777777” came in a few places behind.

“We can criticize all we want about the chronic failure of users to employ strong passwords,” Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder of Keeper Security said, ZD Net reported. “After all, it’s in the users’ best interests to do so. But the bigger responsibility lies with website owners who fail to enforce the most basic password complexity policies. It isn’t hard to do, but the list makes it clear that many still don’t bother.”

List Of Worst Passwords

Keeper researchers further pointed out that the type password usage has not improved over the years. This point to the fact that people would rather choose a password that they will have no difficulty in remembering rather than a secure and less predictable password. Researchers have criticized users who choose convenience over security. They have further stated that there can be no excuse for picking passwords like “qwerty” or “password”. According to a report from Business Insider, following is the extensive list of the worst passwords used by users in 2016:

123456

123456789

qwerty

12345678

111111

1234567890

1234567

password

123123

987654321

qwertyuiop

mynoob

123321

666666

18atcskd2w

7777777

1q2w3e4r

654321

555555

3rjs1la7qe

google

1q2w3e4r5t

123qwe

zxcvbnm

1q2w3e

Keeper has advised users to change their password if it resembles any of the ones listed above. Also, as precautionary measure, it is always wise to use different passwords for different websites. That way, if a single online account of a person is hacked, all of them would not end up being compromised.